Ulysses is as an absolutely incredible book, the Martello tower in the morning with Stephen and Mulligan looking out at the “snotgreen sea” will forever live rent free in my head.
One of the problems is that the UK legal system has a presumption that computers are reliable. They are assumed to be working properly unless proved otherwise, which shifts the burden of proof on the person trying to claim that they are not working properly.
Many commentators are saying that this presumption should be changed:
This was coupled by the victims being lied to that they were the only ones. Had they known this was systematic they could have mounted a more effective defence.
I had the strange experience of reading all of Paradise Lost and finding it very understandable, but having the opposite experience with Aeropagetica, where I had to give up because I couldn't understand what he was saying. Prose should normally be more comprehensible than poetry, but something about the organization of Milton's prose sentences made it very difficult for me to follow.
I agree. The difficulty (in my opinion) is largely because he's writing in direct response to particular critics, and without necessarily giving a precis of their arguments. (The occasional vituperative barb - and he could be mean - is only slight relief.) He also feels compelled to drive into the ground every. single. last. objection. that anyone might have. A good critical edition can help with the former problem (and with his penchant for including long, long untranslated quotations in the many, many languages he knew), but nothing can help with the latter. Contemporaries found him hard to read, too.
I think this is holding Euclid's work to a higher standard that didn't exist at that time. I believe you're referring to "Proof-checking Euclid"(2019)[0], in which the authors used computer proof-checking methods to verify the correctness of our proofs of the propositions in Euclid Book I.
Euclid Book I was written 2,300 years ago. I think it's reasonable that some "additional" axioms were occasionally implied. As [0] states, "[that] gap is filled by adding a 'circle–circle' axiom, according to which if circle C has a point inside circle K, and also a point outside circle K, then there is a point lying on both C and K." I'm not sure, but I feel like that might be reasonable to do for a reader of Euclid Book I in 300 B.C.
So is the proof "invalid"? Yeah maybe, according to modern definitions. But I don't think the logic of that part of the proof was actually flawed, just under-presented.
